Title is a little sensational but this is a cool project for non-technical folks who may need a mini-internet or data archive for a wide variety of reasons:
“PrepperDisk is a mini internet box that comes preloaded with offline backups of Wikipedia, street maps, survivalist information, 90,000 WikiHow guides, iFixit repair guides, government website backups (including FEMA guides and National Institutes of Health backups), TED Talks about farming and survivalism, 60,000 ebooks and various other content. It’s part external hard drive, part local hotspot antenna—the box runs on a Raspberry Pi that allows up to 20 devices to connect to it over wifi or wired connections, and can store and run additional content that users store on it. It doesn’t store a lot of content (either 256GB or 512GB), but what makes it different from buying any external hard drive is that it comes preloaded with content for the apocalypse.”
This is just an ad for that device. Title made it sound like there’s a run on storage devices.
Yeah I thought it was saying there was a run on hard drives designed to survive end of the world not just something preloaded with data
Most tape drives can do that but they are slow.
512GB for the bargain price of $189?? Why are we shilling what we can download via torrent for free?
If you are asking this question, this product is probably not for you.
It’s for the non-technical prepper type, the guy who has 10,000 rounds of ammo and dried food for 10 years but still uses AOL.
The idea is just get this thing, plug it into a solar power bank, and then you can get information you might need to survive which wouldn’t be available online if there is no more internet. You could absolutely put the same thing together yourself without a problem. If you have the skill and the wherewithal to do that, you don’t need this. If you don’t have that skill, then you are the target market of this product.I mean, I could make tacos at home. Or I could pay a bit more to go pick them up somewhere. I could change my own oil, or I could have someone else do it.
I could spend time downloading all this data and uploading it to a hard drive I purchase. I know how to do it all. But for the price they’re charging for the drive AND Raspberry Pi and the service of gathering and uploading the data, it’s not that bad of a deal. Especially if you work a full time job and want to use your free time to not do a chore like this. I mean I’m pretty sure there’s torrents for Wikipedia. Not so sure about WikiHow.
If the price was higher I’d be complaining. It’s pretty reasonable. It’s a peace of mind thing without hassle for anyone with even a little extra cash lying around.
You really should change your own oil and filter. Its stupidly easy, and the shit I’ve seen happen at lube shops makes me wake up in cold sweat.
Nobody touches my vehicle unless I absolutely cannot accomplish the job myself.
I plan to be the jerking guy at Vesuvius if the nukes fall.
If you enjoy this sort of stuff make sure to support the Kiwix Project which like 90% of these commercial offshoots are based off of.
My problem with preppers is the over estimating on whether they’ll be in a position that these skills will have any effect, and the under valuing on steps we could just take to not have this future in the first place.
Like, you’ll need a farm right off the bat, or your first steps in any guider are how to violently take somebody else’s land. Followed by step two, keeping that land from other humans who don’t want to die.
Instead of prepping, become nomadic scroungers or live in a fricking farming commune in the first place. Basically descend a couple levels of societal development and you’ll already be self sufficient and ready. Like the Amish.
Or, you know, voting for politicians who listen to scientists.
Anything beyond being self sufficient for a month is overkill in my opinion.
The overlap between climate crisis deniers and preppers is so large it‘s truly baffling. If you ask me most of them are just hobbyists who act a little too seriously about their little passion. It‘s a lot of make believe and very little obtaining practical skills.
I went down the rabbit hole on YouTube a bit and man, a lot of them seem to want the shit to hit the fan. These are people who absolutely lay down to go to sleep at night and fantasize about getting to bug out.
These are people who absolutely lay down to go to sleep at night and fantasize about getting to bug out.
In other words, they correctly realize that society as it exists sucks, but are too deep into right-wing propaganda to consider that less drastic measures than a collapse (such as voting for socialist policies) could fix it.
I love seeing all the tacticool “operators” with their tricked out ARs, bulletproof vests and helmets, flexicuffs, and other shit but look like they get gassed slowly ascending the stairs from their mother’s basement. Rule #1 in the zombie apocalypse is Cardio.
Also society isn’t going to collapse overnight. If it does it will be a slow crawl until going full Gravy Seal is warranted. They need to survive until then.
Also society isn’t going to collapse overnight.
Not if it goes down like you expect it to.
In my experience, the real problems are the ones you weren’t planning for.
Even if we don’t end up nuking each other like we thought we would in the 60s-90s, we could still get a massive asteroid / comet strike with less than a week’s notice. That innocent looking star 23 light years away could have collapsed 22.99 years ago and zap us with a gamma ray burst next week.
More likely: something we don’t even know about comes along and makes life far more challenging than it has been for 100,000 years.
Humans are very bad at intuitively grasping very large and very small numbers, and that includes very small probabilities. The odds of a civilization-ending asteroid or comet hitting Earth in the next century is minuscule. Especially with the “not seeing it until it’s a week away” condition, we’ve come a very long way when it comes to mapping near-Earth asteroids and there just aren’t any places for them to hide any more. Especially not once Vera C. Rubin goes online.
That innocent looking star 23 light years away could have collapsed 22.99 years ago and zap us with a gamma ray burst next week.
A star that’s capable of producing a gamma ray burst is not “innocent-looking”, it’s actually very obvious. There are none that are that close to us. They’d also need to have a very precisely aimed axis to hit us, gamma ray bursts look so bright in part because their “beam” is so narrow.
The odds of a civilization-ending asteroid or comet hitting Earth in the next century is minuscule.
Absolutely, based on the information we have today.
That dark swarm of asteroids that was launched out of the Magellanic Cloud 8 billion years ago that’s coming on a direct collision course against the Milky Way rotation - yeah, we don’t know about that one.
The thing about our probabilities of events that haven’t happened yet to leave a scar that we can notice on the surface of the Earth, we haven’t been very good at observing the sky except for the last 100 years or so, really 50. So, we’re learning more and more about things and newly discovered hazards don’t lower the probability of occurrence…
A star that’s capable of producing a gamma ray burst is not “innocent-looking”, it’s actually very obvious. There are none that are that close to us.
That we know of the mechanism that produced the burst. What we don’t know about that star is the super Jupiters orbiting it in a quasi stable multi-body arrangement that could collapse a bunch of mass into the star and turn it from Jekyll to Hyde under your bed ASAP.
Absolutely, based on the information we have today.
Right. You have to dream up counterfactual fantasies in order for it to be a problem.
That dark swarm of asteroids that was launched out of the Magellanic Cloud 8 billion years ago that’s coming on a direct collision course against the Milky Way rotation - yeah, we don’t know about that one.
And you don’t need to worry about it, because as I said, the human mind is very bad at intuitively grasping the implications of very large or very small numbers.
Go ahead and actually calculate what risk there might be from something like this. How much mass do those asteroids have? What’s their collective cross-section, and how does that compare to the volume of space they’d be passing through? How big is Earth in comparison?
I’m betting the odds will still be microscopic. I feel safe betting that because we have real world evidence that bodies in our solar system don’t frequently get hit by ghost asteroids from the Magellanic Cloud (there’s an 80’s sci-fi movie title for you). Large impacts are few and far between these days,
That we know of the mechanism that produced the burst.
Once again, sure, you could imagine that ordinary stars sometimes miraculously pop like balloons to spray us with liquid death.
If you want it to actually be a worrying scenario, though, it needs to be backed up with some kind of evidence or theory that makes it plausible. And again, we don’t actually see frequent gamma ray bursts in reality, so whatever mechanism you propose needs to be rare for it to fit the data.
Eh we’re already seeing massive drops in skilled labor. The political environment will create food scarcity in 12 months. It’s already paying to be able to fix your home and car. Can’t imagine what next year will bring. Probably unemployment for many.
Heading right for Soviet resource scarcity.
Anybody know where to find an archive of this disk?
It’s all publicly available info, or was. I’ve got a Raid 5 I can throw it on, might come in handy during power outs and such.
I’ve got spare hard drives, and an old Pi and other computers around. No need to spend $189 on this when you can pretty easily DIY. The value is the prepackaged archive.
I see projects like kwix and such, but I don’t immediately see this archive or anything comparable. Haven’t looked into this before.
BTW, if you’re actually worried about the end of the world or whatever, this won’t save you. Make friends with your neighbors and communities. If you don’t have a physical trade, you need to learn one like fixing shit or growing really good weed.
*Edit suck - such
Download the App, and you can then download a full backup of Wikipedia, PHP Manuals, the “Survival Library”, Ted Talks, FEMA guides, etc.
So I can easily get pretty much all of this through kwix directly? That will work. Throw it on my Raid. My media server is badly overworked but I should be able to use any old sbc as a frontend for the archive.
Precisely. Kiwix has a search and browse function. Just sort by file size to get the biggest groups of data.
Ooh. As a hobbyist “mostly for funzies” prepper I was mildly interested. But then I clicked around their site a bit and I found preorders for a version of the prepper disk with an LLM chatbot “companion.”. Assuming the LLM is using RAG on the library of source documents and isn’t just relying on its training, that’s really neat. I know people will exclaim “hallucination!”, but in a situation where you literally have no idea what to do, no way to get help, and the alternative is lying down and dying, I could see this being really handy. Often the hardest part of having a giant archive of information is how to find what you need out of it and interpret what it’s telling you.
I’d rather use an “open” version of this, though. Prepper Disk’s website sounds like they’re trying to keep their data at least partially locked down, and while I can understand that they want to recoup the cost of the effort they put into setting this up it kind of goes against the grain of prepping to rely on something that you can’t repair or modify yourself.
AI opponents will spend their last hours manually slogging through 250GB of content rather than let a hallucination potentially misguide them.
I’m reminded of that AI-written book that misidentified poisonous mushrooms.
I’m reminded that AI is helping me restore an old motorbike I got for practically free, and the only fight we had was looking for the oil filter on the wrong side of the bike
Yeah, you have to take it for what it’s worth, and it’s worth a lot. Most of what it says is pretty close, and when close is good enough, go for it. When AI is telling you how to secure your brake hydraulic connectors and it doesn’t seem quite right - time for a 2nd opinion.
For sure, AIs/llms can be dangerous if you don’t also apply critical thinking, but that’s been true of the internet forever, and even before. The Anarchist cookbook has recipes that will, at best, waste a bunch of soap and gasoline or have you scraping banana peels with a razorblade, or at worst, have you making chlorine gas in your basement. 4chan had a popular recipe for “peanut butter cookies” that would result in an oven fire, and instructions to drill a hole in your iPhone to use the headphone jack.
It’s much more important to protect and promote critical thinking skills than it is to try to shield everybody from misinformation and hallucinations.
Right. So it told you objectively wrong information while the correct answer is freely available from technical documents that it ought to know how to read.
So imagine if that was something actually life threatening.
You’ll never win against AI haters. Nothing is perfectly accurate and even if LLMs are less accurate than average it does not diminish the use case potential.
If someone’s eats a dradly mushroom based on 1 research source then really thats just natural selection at play lol
Related reddit thread interesting enough https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/gqvuwm/serious_question_best_way_to_empproof_usb_sticks/
What if we could calculate the bending of light around black holes and just hammer away data at space and pick it up again at a set interval… No storage needed!
Am looking for research funding.
Fear = Profit!
Would you like to know more?Yeah but if society collapses or there’s some long power outage (sup Texas) then this thing could be worth its weight in gold. More than its weight in gold.
Assuming you have a generator.
If society collapses, the time until people forget enough to make whatever’s on the hard drive a rare information repository worth its weight in gold will be a lot longer than the working lifespan of a typical hard drive.
WikiHow
One of these things is not like the others
Thank you, they’ve been ruining search results since the day SEO was coined.
Yeah, but won’t you need enough electricity to power a monitor, keyboard, and mouse for this to work?
That doesn’t take much power, a solar panel or two should be more than sufficient, or you can rig something up w/ a defunct ebike (just run the motor backwards to generate electricity).
If the monitor draws even 20W, you’re gonna be tired of that eBike generator solution really quick.
The average laptop is 65W. So the 40 amp solar battery station I built with a 100w panel could run a laptop 7 hours a day without any issues at all. Plenty of time to get actionable information out of it.
Sure, solar works. And batteries work - for about 3000 charge-discharge cycles.
That’s… a lot of cycles. That’s almost a decade. Plenty of time to build an electric generator from scratch by traveling on foot to a copper mine and smelting the wire yourself. Unless you manage to pull an alternator from a car that can’t find gasoline and save yourself the trip. From that you could make a gravity battery or any number of other options.
Point being, after 3000 cycles, it’s toast and there’s no fresh bread available.
Yes, you could construct something, but I think you’d be pretty amazed at how maintenance intensive a 1kWh gravity battery is.
Point is that 3000 cycles is more than enough time to find or make a replacement even if society doesn’t rebuild.
Maybe I should just use these and cancel my internet
I remember when offline backups that were unaffected by EMP were everywhere.
They called them books.
unaffected by EMP were everywhere.
They called them books.
Out of curiosity what the range and/or power for an EMP pulse to brick my microSD with Zim files on it?
Wondering what’s the actual risk of such a thing happening, what kind of scenarii would this require?
Someone can correct me but if I recall there’s many types. So it’s a complicated answer.
Yeah okay, carry that amount of information in your go bag via physical books.
Hope you have a microscope.
microfilm is a real thing btw.
it was used for army intel for decades.
Tape drives are pretty good too. I worked at a few places where they still used them in case of disaster.
https://www.prepperdisk.com/pages/how-does-it-work
Would be nice if they’d offer downloads for the disk image. Or at least sell the disk image since I don’t need yet another Pi lol.
Is it also hardened against EPM’s?
Wrap em in foil. Boom protected. But kinda moot if there’s no power.
Make sure to etch your foil with how to rig up solar cells for power.
That’s my next question. If things are bad enough that the Internet is gone, what reliable source of power would survive the unknown scenario that got things that bad?
That power source would also need to power a separate computer or smartphone that would also need to be kept protected from whatever happened.
A cheap solar panel can be gotten off Amazon or your local tech store if you have one for around $50. More than enough to power something like this, I would imagine.
At least while it’s sunny out.
You are correct.
I’m just wondering as everyone likes to think of what they would do in a post-collapse society…when in reality these tiny drives will probably be much less useful than the knowledge on how to create electricity. Solar or otherwise. I like them though, and the article does an awesome job at stating what their purpose is. That’s great.
Solar has the issue that it’s hard to create the panels themselves, but there’s a plethora of ways to create and maintain electrical systems. A small wind generator could probably be easy to rig up as well.
Back when my state had power outages every other day for long periods of time, we found out what worked and what didn’t real quick.
